


Fear

by Dawen



Category: Guardians of Childhood - William Joyce, Rise of the Guardians (2012)
Genre: Fall of the Golden Age, Fearling War, Gen, POV Second Person, Stream of Consciousness, but both are technically on screen, nongraphic character death, nongraphic genocide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-17
Updated: 2018-01-17
Packaged: 2019-03-05 21:36:09
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,455
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13396719
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Dawen/pseuds/Dawen
Summary: You try to catch rides with stars, but they know the fear too and they don’t trust their own kin, let alone strangers, just the way you don’t, and they see the trail behind you and see the desperation in your eyes and they refuse, make you seek shelter in someone else’s light.(The Fearlings are slow and insidious enemies, and by the time anyone realizes something's wrong, it's too late.)





	Fear

It starts out slow, slow and small and almost insignificant. You’re always scared, really, but those are rational fears. You can take steps against them–you can rig up a shelter over the crops and plug up the leaks in your home. You’ll still have a bit of fear, but you’ll have done something useful towards assuaging it and you’ll know you did your best.

The Fearlings’ fear? It isn’t rational, like all your other fears, fears of the acid rain and the hungry predators and the sickly, poisonous fog. You don’t know when it starts, you just wake up and notice, notice you’re scared and notice everyone else is too. It’s irrational, completely irrational like a phobia, only worse, because a phobia only encompasses this one thing, like crowds or tiny spaces. Fearling fear is more like EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME–crowds _and_ tiny spaces _and_ diseases _and_ ohmygod what if I go out and hurt myself badly _and_ can I really trust this person I’ve had a friendly rivalry with all my life _and_ can I really trust this person I’ve trusted all my life _and_ what if that piece of machinery that’s never malfunctioned in my considerably long life happens to break _right now whenIneeditmost_ –

And once you assuage one of those induced fears, you turn your concentration to the next, and all of a sudden the first one is resurrected _and you have to deal with it all over again._

And then you’re so busy guarding yourself mentally against these completely irrational, stupid, helpless fears that you don’t have time or energy to do all the work that you _would_ have done to protect the crops from the acid rain and caulk up your home from the sickly fog, and suddenly your rational fears increase because ohmygod I’m _so far behind_ this is _all my fault and mywholefamily'sgoingtodie…_

And then there’s that little pesky fact that Fearlings are just corporeal enough to cause you physical harm, yet they’re incredibly hard to physically harm themselves, since they’re mostly shadow. So now you’ve got battle wounds on top of it all, that are probably very likely to get infected, and you can’t even tell if that’s an induced fear of infection or if they really do get infected easier than any other kind of wound you’ve ever seen.

And your friends and family are dropping all around you and there’s this all-encompassing fear of _am I next?_ that, somehow, mysteriously towers above every other fear. And you’re starting to wonder if the smiths are going to be able to keep up production of weapons, especially when the Fearlings go straight for them, a combination of dousing any light they see and being directed to cut off supplies by the Turncoat General. And they seem to spread a blight on the crops, a side-effect of their shadow nature that blocks the photosynthesis, and now you can’t even depend on your famine foods. And then the next thing you know, you’re hearing about this one Pooka a few villages over, who tried attacking the Fearlings with fire, and somehow it all backfired and now the earth for miles around the village is nothing but charred ash and you’re still not sure if anyone survived, and now you can’t even trust the fire that was supposed to keep you safe.

And the Fearlings finally do what the pollution and degradation and poison from past mistakes couldn’t, and the homeworld – half-charred and smoldering in panic and ash and blood – is evacuated, only the depths of space are even worse, because there’s _so much more dark_ for them to hide in and you have so little light and food and air, and you can’t seek sanctuary from any of the other sentient races because while you were desperately trying to hold things together at home, the others all got run off and killed and you’re the last bastion of the Golden Age, how did that happen, _that can’t be right_ because you jump at every shadow, even your own.

So you have to go hopping from charred planet to charred planet, refueling on food and air and ship fuel, and every time you do the Fearlings catch up and your numbers dwindle even more. The population is aging fast, the children were taken and turned long ago and those of childbearing age can’t actually bear children anymore from the stress and the immediate target painted on their bellies and teats and scent, and there isn’t anyone younger than middle age anymore. You try to catch rides with stars, but they know the fear too and they don’t trust their own kin, let alone strangers, just the way you don’t, and they see the trail behind you and see the desperation in your eyes and they refuse, make you seek shelter in someone else’s light. The loss of the First Light is even worse now, but you can’t dwell on that, you have to keep going, if you stop for even a couple of hours they will catch up and there will be yet another massacre, you know there will.

And eventually you’re down to three ships, barely manned, a real skeleton crew from lack of numbers and lack of food, and you decide to split up. Partly you’re afraid the other two crews will try to cannibalize you, partly you’re afraid you will cannibalize them, partly you’re afraid of rising tempers and broken weapons and lack of space to move. You don’t really think about making the Fearlings split up, about making them choose which ship to go after, about how long it will take them to overtake it and then go after the next, and then the last. You don’t think about those things because you’re exhausted, you’re hungry and sick and hurt, you’re not sure but maybe one of your wounds is infected, and really you lost most of your tactical skills long before, back when your home turned to charcoal.

But the Fearlings have grown, and grown, and grown, and they started out small, you’re sure they did. You’re sure they were only as big as the goats you used to keep for milk, Before. Before the fear, before the fire and the heartache and the blood. But now they’re as big as the legendary predators, the ones your ancestors hunted out, but you don’t know how, _you don’t know how you don’t know how_ , they must be three or four times as big as a Pooka and you can’t keep fighting, you can’t.

They catch up. They split up the same as you do, only it doesn’t affect them quite as much, and now you see your mistake, you see the terrible error in splitting your numbers that the fear drove you to make. And there’s slaughter and blood and bodies and that horrible black ooze that eats through your sword, and then you plunge a torch into the last Fearling and you’re back in the ship with the last of the wounded and you’re heading off as fast as you can, trying for the next planet with air and food and fuel.

They die on the way. You try to help, of course you do, even with the fear in the back of your head saying _don’t waste your resources, don’t use up your magic, you’ll need it all later, don’t waste it on the walking dead_. But they die and on the next body with an atmosphere, you have to dump them out unceremoniously, take in a deep gulp, and head off again.

It’s not for months later, traveling as fast as you can manage with as little air and food and sleep as you can manage, going fast so the Fearlings can’t track you, until you hit a new solar system in a new galaxy and find a habitable planet that isn’t scorched, it’s green _it’s green_ you’ve forgotten what that looked like, you’re not all that sure you ever knew to begin with. And you come in closer and you see that it’s egg-shaped, and that comforts you somehow but you also know that’s bad, _bad bad bad_ , and you land and you make it spherical and stable and safe, _safe you’re safe now_ , and you dig out a little depression and sleep for a few thousand years.

And you wake up and you dig, and you sleep, and wake up and dig, and take barely any notice of the new creatures that are natives of this new green planet, just enough to know they’re not Fearlings, _thank God they’re not Fearlings._

You sleep for millions of years, but it’s millions more before you can paint your eggs red again.

**Author's Note:**

> You know all those people who say they “accidentally” wrote a short fic? I never understood how that happened. Writing’s not that much like doodling, you have to consciously put one word in front of another in a way that makes sense. Right?  
> Now I know. Now, I have done it myself.
> 
> First written and posted on Tumblr (@dawen-nightmaiden, for those interested) two years ago. Minorly edited when I transferred it over.


End file.
